World inequality report 2022
揭露世界的真相是一份吃力不讨好的工
World Inequality Report 2022
The job of holding up a mirror to the world can be a frustrating one. When the news is persistently bad, when the mirror highlights more wrinkles than we want to face up to, it is easy enough to find excuses— we are about to turn the corner, there is no other way to go, efficiency demands this, think of all the other good things that are happening, and the evergreen favorite, the data is wrong. Chasing down（认清，看透，看穿，分析清楚，梳理） each of these narratives（谬论，论调，说法，看法） and slaying them takes stubbornness and hard work（需要不懈努力）. Over the last twenty-five years, Thomas Piketty has been leading this fight(不是inequality，是chasing down...), first by himself, then with a growing team of collaborators, culminating in the World Inequality Lab. [1] 起初单打独斗，后来伙伴越来越多，团队逐渐壮大，逐渐形成了世界不平等研究实验室。
This report is the current flagship product（重磅产品） of the Lab. It is the product of a relentless data amassment which makes it possible（基于海量的数据）
我们收集了大量的数据来提供更好的答案
to provide better answers to almost every question we want to ask about what is happening to inequality world-wide. The answer is not pretty. In every large region（各大区域） of the world with the exception of Europe（欧洲除外）, the share of the bottom 50% in total earnings is less than 15% (less than ten in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and MENA region) while the share of the richest 10% is over 40% and in many of the regions, closer to 60%.
[2] But what is perhaps even more striking is what is happening to wealth. The share of the bottom 50%（较平穷的50%/那一半） of the world in total global wealth is 2% by their estimates, while the share of the top 10% is 76%. Since wealth is a major source of future economic gains（财富是未来经济收入的主要来源）, and increasingly, of power and influence（也越来越容易转化为权力和影响力）, this presages further increases in inequality. Indeed, at the heart of this explosion（贫富差距的剧烈恶化） is the extreme concentration of the economic power in the hands of a very small minority of the super-rich.（高度集中在一小撮超级富豪手中） [3] The wealth of the top 10% globally, which constitutes the middle class in rich countries and the merely rich（一般的富人，要看具体所指的人群） in poor countries is actually growing slower than the world average, but the top 1% is growing much faster: between 1995 and 2021, the top 1% captured 38% of the global increment in wealth（占有全世界财富增长量的8%）, while the bottom 50% captured a frightening 2%（竟然只有百分之二）. The share of wealth owned by the global top 0.1% / rose from 7% to 11% over that period and global billionaire wealth soared. With the boom in the stock market（股市大涨，牛市，股市繁荣）, the picture does not seem to be getting better.（现状似乎不会有所改善） [4]
And yet, as the report makes clear, there is no case for giving up or opting to sit it out till the revolution. The period from 1945 or 1950 till 1980, was a period of shrinking inequality in many parts of the world (US, UK, France, but also India and China). For the countries of the West these were also covered the thirty odd (Thrity or so三十多) years of fast productivity growth and increasing prosperity, never matched since（后无来者/再也没有出现过）—in other words there is no prima facie evidence for the idea that fast growth demands or necessarily goes hand in hand with growing inequality. [5] The reason why that was possible had a lot to do with policy—tax rates were high（当时税率比较高，不平等需要得到控制）, and there was an ideology（而这种观点） that inequality needed to kept in check, that was shared between（被...所认同） the corporate sector, civil society（公民团体） and the government. The same experience was repeated, if briefly, in the first years of this millennium in Latin America, when growth accelerated, poverty and wage inequality went down, thanks to a strong commitment to redistributive policies. [6]
However, for most of the world, the defining experience turned out to be the panicked reaction to the slowdown of growth in US and UK in the 1970s, that led to the conviction that a big part of the problem was that the institutions that kept inequality low (minimum wage, union, taxes, regulation, etc.) were to blame, and that what we needed was to unleash an entrepreneurial culture that celebrates the unabashed accumulation of private wealth. [7]
当时人们觉得问题很大程度出在那些控制不平等制度上
celebrate：提倡，鼓励，推崇
We now know that as the Reagan-Thatcher revolution and it was the starting point of a dizzying rise in inequality within countries that continues to this day. When state control was (successfully) loosened in countries like China and India to allow private sector-led growth, the same ideology got trotted out to justify not worrying about inequality, with the consequence that India is now among the most unequal countries in the world (based on this report) and China risks getting there soon. [8]
Policy kept inequality in check, and policy changes let it run amok. This report once again makes it clear that profound policy changes are needed for things to fall back in place. The policy solutions often exist, and when they don’t, we often know how to find them. Our own research, and that of the researchers in the network we helped create, has focused on how to get the plumbing right, so that policy can do its job. The World Inequality Lab and all those involved in this report are doing the same for how to collect taxes and redistribute better. [9]
As the world comes out of the pandemic and there is renewed attention to economic policy, a report like this is extraordinarily timely. It has the potential to light a fire under us to do something now, before the cumulative concentration of economic (and other) power in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority makes it impossible to fight back. Read it, shout out its messages, find ways to act upon it. [10]